Alice Bell
Botany Manor is a game that seems calculated to make me sit up on alert like a meerkat, or crash through a wall yelling like that sentient jug mascot (I am not from America, I just know he exists). It’s a puzzle game about growing plants. Holy Strange Horticulture, Batman! But Botany Manor is much less eldritch, and much more gentle historical feel-good movie starring Emma Thompson in the lead role. That role – which in this case is played by you in first person rather than La Thompson – is of Arabella Greene, a retired botanist who, thank God, is the childless inheritor of a huge manor and ancestral wealth, and so is able to spend the sunny days of 1890 pottering around the house and grounds researching weird, slightly fantastical plants almost wholly untroubled. So in this respect it is also a fantasy game. It’s quite delightful, which is the sort of phrase I am confident Arabella would use.
The game is divided into several chapters corresponding to a research book that Arabella is filling out, with a view to submitting it for publication. I say Arabella is almost wholly untroubled as you can, if you pay attention, discover letters or articles that tell the story of how Arabella’s expertise was passed over in favour of, or even entirely stolen by, less talented men over the years, because botany is a science and Victorian women should get married and do embroidery. It’s a story that suggests a full but frustrating life, but it does make the conclusion sweeter if you’re following along.
Your main concern, as is Arabella’s, is the plants. Each chapter gives you a number of plants to plant and make bloom by recreating the specific environment they thrive in. To do this, you look around the environment and gather clues, and there is no quest marker or on screen prompt saying ‘Gather clues about Sapphire Gloom (1/2)’ as you get to work. Instead, you read various materials or examine items scattered around, and then lock in which clues you think are pertinent for what plant – and the game will tell you when you’ve done that. You still need to read the clues, though, because even when you’ve found them Botany Manor will not tell you which bit of the information you’ve found is correct. Arabella does not, at any point, say something like “I should check the chart I saw earlier to find out what breed of bird that is, which colour of flowers their attracted to, and what kind of pot and fertiliser to use to achieve said colour in this plant I’m trying to make bloom”.
No, you have to make those connections, and take all those steps, for yourself, and many of them are surprising, specific, and lovely. You find a note about roasting chestnuts in the fire, and look at the pot you’re holding with a seed that refused to germinate with water; you cross reference the train ticket you found with the type of wood that grows in that area to create the required type of smoke. Many of the plants are heightened, fantastical versions of the sort of plants that evolve in real life, and showcase the delicate balance of ecosystems. Urbanising a stretch of river decreases the number of local birds, whose singing is necessary for a very rare fern to grow (because the birds nest in it). A lot of the clues are based on children’s stories and folk tales – like the plant that traps sleeping fairies at night, which ends with you staring at illustrations of moths.
As you complete each section of the book you access, either by solving puzzles or by finding keys, more and more areas of the manor, and the devs have clearly taken pains to make it a nice place to be. There is no reason for you to be able to look out over a valley and see the field opposite has cows in it, but you can. That it is necessary to pay absolute attention to the clues that you find means that you pay attention to everything around you, and it is a bright, bouncy 3D world on a beautiful day – the sort of day where you can leave your picnic blanket out – that makes your heart soar a little bit. It is an environmentalist’s game, in a way. I loved looking at the plants I made grow, and thought about how their shape might help them in their natural habitat, and took great pleasure in putting them all in one room together.
The result as a whole is that Botany Manor is extremely peaceful and focused puzzle game, even as the puzzles increase in complexity. It is an oasis of calm. You know that everything you need is around you somewhere, and that you have all the time you need, and this makes it immensely satisfying when you do figure the puzzles out – because nobody helped you at all. You can take your time cataloguing apples. You can look for the different duck models that are hanging around. You can carefully examine the cards on the board game to discover which animal’s heartbeat will stimulate this meadow plant. I only wish Botany Manor was longer – I would buy any DLC you care to name, be it a Succulents Pack or a Winter Plants Special, or what have you – except I have a suspicion it is perfectly balanced as it is.
This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by publishers Whitethorn Games.
ranzware
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